Driving Towards Better Broadband, Maine Buckles Up For Difficult Road Ahead

Maine Connectivity Authority President Andrew Butcher has his 1984 yellow Volkswagen van – affectionately known as “Buttercup” – all gassed up and ready to barnstorm across Maine this week.

Butcher and his team will visit libraries, community centers, town halls, Tribal governments, connectivity hubs, and telehealth locations all across the Pine Tree State as state broadband officials and local connectivity champions celebrate the broadband expansion work that’s already been done and to gather “local insights (for) the next phase of work.”

The five-day “Driving Connections” tour will highlight broadband infrastructure investments the state has made to bring high-speed Internet access to 86,000 homes and businesses over the past several years.

But, perhaps more crucial to the mission: the tour also aims to rally state leaders and local communities to continue the work, even as the Trump administration “terminated” the Digital Equity Act last month and more recently drastically altered the infrastructure-focused BEAD program – both of which have undermined state’s efforts to expand Internet connectivity and eliminate barriers to broadband adoption.

“It feels like an important time to show how we are connected to each other in more ways than just high-speed Internet connections,” Butcher told ILSR in the days leading up to the tour.

“So much of the work we have been doing is built on these intricate set of networks and human connection," he said.

"It’s getting more difficult doing this work – with the (digital equity) funding getting cut and the (BEAD) funding changes. But we hope to shine a light and share the love of all the work in motion. There’s a huge amount of activity that we have to show – that people should be celebrating and springboarding from.”

For Butcher, there’s no better way to do that than for the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) – the state’s broadband office – to hit the road and bring local broadband champions together to assess where to go from here, while “highlighting over two dozen projects and partners” throughout the week.

Five days of building better connections

The first stop on the tour is today, at the Woodstock Library, where Butcher and his team will meet with the town’s librarian, the town manager, and a digital navigator to hear how the state broadband office can continue to support community-based digital inclusion work in western Maine.

Following that meeting is a whirlwind schedule with a stop at the Maine Passive House to get a tour of the Wi-Fi hotspot program funded through the Northern Border Regional Commission. From there, the “Driving Connections” team will head over to Telstar High School for a lunch meeting with Adult Education leaders to discuss how to better expand connectivity in the region.

In the afternoon, MCA will host a community meeting with elected officials in the Town of Bethel, followed by a visit to the public Wi-Fi access center at the Bethel Library gazebo and the Larry Lebonte Recovery Center to highlight how Internet access is vital for those in substance use recovery, before ending the day at the Hope Association Connectivity Hub.

Right from the start of the tour, Butcher said, the “layers that stack” will showcase community networks, how infrastructure funding was made available for regional partners, and how that has been “driving the demand to engage with private ISPs and enable large (private sector) investments in last mile connectivity.”

Another layer of the work that will be on display is how Community Anchor Institutions “have put forward the concepts to be connectivity hubs,” as well as “the five different types of investments that have been made through the (federal) American Rescue Plan Act.”

All told, Butcher said, it has “helped drive competitive grant applications for a regional-scale public-private partnership that got a dollar-for-dollar match from the service provider and queued up Community Anchor Institutions for the connectivity hub program.”

Each day this week, “Buttercup” and the “Driving Connections” tour will roll into a different region of the state. Tomorrow, it will be in Central Maine, beginning with a morning coffee chat at the Maine State House with Maine Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Mike Duguay and Maine State legislators.

On Wednesday, the tour makes its way to northern Maine, kicking off the day with the Northern Maine Development Commission and County Administrator Ryan Pelletier, before hosting a ConnectMaine Board meeting at Caribou Library.

On Thursday, Butcher and his team will head Downeast for a morning chat with the Greater East Grand Economic Council and the Town Manager of Danforth before making a site visit at the Passamaquoddy Tribe Connectivity Hub at Motahkomikuk.

The final day of the tour ends in the Midcoast region and will conclude with a celebration of the state’s Middle Mile program, highlighting the Lincoln County project.

You can find a detailed schedule of the “Driving Tour” here.

‘Complex and boring’ work fuels exciting ‘connectivity landscape of the future’

While much has been done to bring high-speed Internet across one of the most rural states in the nation, Butcher candidly acknowledges the job is far from complete.

“The nature of the work is very complex and pretty boring to most people,” he said – made all the more difficult by Trump administration changes to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that intended to finally eliminate the digital divide in every state across the country.

After years of arduous planning – working with local communities and Internet service providers, standing up broadband offices and state administered grant programs – the Trump administration not only cancelled Digital Equity Act funding, but also drastically revamped the spending rules in the $42.5 billion BEAD program.

With states having finalized the maps that guide where projects would be funded – and with many states having completed their grant application process with shovel-ready projects ready to build new networks – the Trump administration initiated a funding freeze, despite GOP Congressional leaders campaign criticisms of the Biden administration taking too long to launch the program.

Then, earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick issued a new BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity that ensures the rollout will take even longer, forcing some states to re-do bidding processes in a way that favors Elon Musk’s Starlink company.

For Maine, Butcher said, “BEAD has been such a monster – $250 million in public funding and private funding across dozens of programs that would enable last mile connections and middle mile expansion.” And even though the BEAD funding won’t be enough to connect every last household and business in the state, Butcher said, it will go a long way to reaching that goal.

Fortunately for Maine, the MCA will not have to completely re-do its bidding process, as is the case in some other states.

“It’s like a Jenga tower: you pull out a few blocks and the whole thing can come toppling down. We are doing our best to minimize anything we need to re-do. We do need to update the map and re-open the subgrantee round. But, fortunately, we did pause (the grant program) when it became clear we couldn't move forward so we didn’t make any official awards yet,” he said.

While other state broadband offices worry the new BEAD rules may discourage ISP participation, Butcher is optimistic that ISPs who bid on projects in Maine won’t be deterred.

“About 70 percent of our project areas received bids and a vast majority of them received multiple bids,” he said, noting how Maine anticipated there would need to be a mix of alternative Internet access technologies besides fiber, which includes Starlink in certain high-cost remote areas.

“Of course, we’d like to maximize fiber projects while being strategic about how to incorporate multiple technologies.”

Still, Butcher said, the additional workload triggered by the BEAD changes essentially means doing “two years of work in two months. We just have to buckle down and proceed. Regardless of how BEAD shakes out, we will ensure each region has the best connectivity possible.”

As for the “termination” of the Digital Equity Act, Butcher said, “it’s an area of real concern. We were set to receive $35 million – with $25 million of that for competitive grants. Those cuts have an immediate impact on staffing capacity. For us, we wanted to use that money for underwriting the capacity of organizations already working with covered populations. The termination of that funding radically impacts us, but we are trying to minimize the impact to personnel and programs.”

“Given how much of Maine is a covered population (as defined in the Digital Equity Act), it’s important for people to be more engaged,” he added, emphasizing why he sees the “Driving Connections” tour as vital.

“When you talk to people, even state legislators, about digital equity or broadband at large, it is hard for people to understand," Butcher said.

"We are talking about a huge amount of activity and transformation over a short time, with so much in flux.”

And while the summertime may be a downtime for many people, for Butcher and his office, now is the time to “listen and hear from our partners around the state – to inform us on how we move forward past this stage as we are actively building out Maine's connectivity landscape for the future.”

This article was published by the Community Broadband Networks Initiative of the Institute for Local Self Reliance on CommunityNets on June 23, 2025, and is reprinted with permission.